Polynesian Island Introduction
To start off our Polynesian island study, we explored the location of the Polynesian islands on our globe and introduced the term island. We didn’t invest lots of money in our globe. In fact, we have a blow up beachball style globe at our house, like this one.
Then we used a hands on activity to reinforce the idea that an island is a piece of land surrounded by water. Since this activity involves pushing small objects like sticks, rocks and leaves into clay, we used this as a fine motor activity to help strengthen the girls pincer strength. This is an important pre-writing skill.
Polynesian Island Intro Circle Time
Learning Objectives:
Show that there are many Polynesian islands in the Pacific Ocean and Moana would have lived on one of them.
An Island is a body of land that is completely surrounded by water.
Materials:
Globe/ Map
Star/simple shape stickers
1 cup of dried rice
For the “Make an island” activity:
Clay – Playdough, salt dough, etc
Natural materials collected from the yard: sticks, leaves, rocks, etc
Paper plate
Crayons/markers
Circle time
To begin, we climbed aboard an imaginary airplane. Then, with our arms out, we “flew” around our living room all the way to Hawaii (back to our circle time spot).
We talked about how Moana was from Montinui which is a (fictional) Polynesian island in the story.
Using our globe, we put gold star stickers both where we live and on Hawaii (the northern most Polynesian island).
We then discussed how islands are small and surrounded by water and how there are lots of Polynesian islands in the Pacific Ocean.
I took 1 cup of rice and poured it into a dish and talked about how, even though we can’t see them all on the map, there are thousands of islands just like there are thousands of pieces of rice in the dish. (1 cup of rice has about 8.6K grains of rice per the internet)
Then, we talked about “What is an island?
An Island is a body of land that is completely surrounded by water.
We reinforced this idea by making our own islands with this activity, but you could also incorporate other island activities like this one.
